As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Information storage is invaluable to organizations and critical to the effective use and operation of information handling systems. A basic component of storage systems are individual storage components such as hard drives. However, hard drives are susceptible to so-called bad blocks which are damaged, corrupted or malfunctioning portions of a memory which can jeopardize data availability or otherwise degrade the data integrity of a storage system. Bad blocks may result from a variety of factors such as damage to a media surface, manufacturing defects, environmental factors, excessive grown defect list (GLIST) entries, etc. These bad blocks may compromise the data integrity of a storage system such as a RAID system.
Current hard drives provide a mechanism for mapping bad blocks to another location within the drive. However, with the increasing size of disk drives the area used for remapping bad blocks has also increased. However, the actual number of blocks that will be remapped to this reserved location will vary with each individual drive. As a result, for information handling systems that employ multiple drives, in any particular drive the reserved location may be used entirely while, for another drive, the reserved location may largely go unused. For a drive with a larger number of bad blocks the reserved location may not be large enough to accommodate remapping all of the bad blocks and the hard drive must be replaced.